jonbeebe / bflag

A simple Go package for building command-line interfaces.

bflag

bflag is a simple Go package for building command-line interfaces. It primarily does two things:

1. Allows you to define valid command-line options for your program.
2. Parses user-provided options and gives you all the other arguments (minus the options) so your program can react accordingly.

What about flag?

There is already a similar official package called flag that has many more features than bflag, but it ultimately didn't fit my needs because it only supports single-hyphen (-flag) options.

Example usage

package main

import (
    "fmt"
    "github.com/jonbeebe/bflag"
)

func main() {
    // Define options for our program
    boolOpt := bflag.DefineBool("mybool", 'b', false)
    strOpt := bflag.DefineString("mystr", 's', "Hello world")
    intOpt := bflag.DefineInt("myint", 'i', 32)
    floatOpt := bflag.DefineFloat("myfloat", 'f', 16.5)
    bflag.Parse()

    // Output invalid arguments (if any were provided)
    args := bflag.Args()
    command := args[0]
    for _, v := range bflag.Invalid() {
        fmt.Println("bflagtest " + command + ": " + v)
    }

    // Print options
    fmt.Printf("Options (%d): ", bflag.NOptions())
    fmt.Printf("--mybool: %t --mystr: %s --myint: %d --myfloat: %.2f\n", boolOpt.Value, strOpt.Value, intOpt.Value, floatOpt.Value)

    // Print arguments (bflag doesn't differentiate between commands and arguments)
    fmt.Printf("Arguments (%d): ", bflag.NArgs())
    for _, v := range args {
        fmt.Printf("%s ", v)
    }
    fmt.Print("\n")
}

TODO

• Handling of --help and --version options
• Documentation